Maldives, facing threat of inundation, plans to relocate its people

Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” followed by his award of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007 failed to convince skeptics that global warming was a critical issue for our planet.

Now we have the somber news that the new President of the Maldives wants to buy a new homeland for his 300,000 people or more accurately their descendants. At present, the highest point on the islands is a mere two metres, while the sea level is expected to rise 60 centimetres or two feet this century. This would make the islands far more vulnerable to wave action, especially during storms.

The Maldives is by no means the only country to be facing the dire threat of flooding and submergence. If present trends in global warming continue without abatement, many other countries will also face horrendous problems, including coastal flooding on an ever increasing scale. Overpopulated Bangladesh and West Bengal province in India could lose more than a quarter of their land displacing tens of millions of poor peasants and laborers.

Unless the melting of the polar icecaps is halted, which appears highly unlikely, it is difficult to envisage how one can prevent the Indian Ocean from submerging the 1000 islands comprising the Maldives, which is the lowest nation in the world.

President Mohamed Nasheed has assumed office as the country's first democratically elected president on Tuesday. He would like to set up a fund to acquire land in other parts of the region, possibly India or Sri Lanka. Sadly, both countries are so overcrowded that it would be impossible to purchase sufficient land for environmental refugees from the Maldives and ensure that it remains unoccupied in the meantime. Land hunger in South Asia is too great to make such a transaction possible.

A better option for the Maldives would to reach an agreement with the government of Australia to gradually purchase land in the northern part of the country. Australia has ample uninhabited space being one of the largest countries in the world and could accommodate the people of the Maldives without a hiccup.

It would be unfair to expect the smaller or poorer countries to bear the consequences of a situation for which they are not to blame without help from the international community. The countries which bear the most responsibility are those that consume the most energy and release the most greenhouse gases. Foremost among them is the United States, but there are others whose consumption of carbon fuels is increasing by leaps and bounds. It is their moral responsibility to come up with solutions that would help reverse global warming and at the same time save the threatened countries from oblivion through drowning.